5 search hits

To analyze scenery obstacles in robotics applications depth information is very valuable. Stereo vision is a powerful way to extract dense range information out of two camera images. In order to unload the CPU the intensive computation can be moved to GPU, taking advantage of the parallel processing capabilities of todays consumer level graphics hardware. This work shows how an efficient implementation on the GPU can be realized utilizing the NVIDIA Cuda framework.

The IEEE 802.11 networks have a tremendous growth in the last years, but also now there is a rapid development of the wireless LAN technologies. High transmission rates, simple deployment and especially low costs make this network technology an efficient and cheap way to get access to the Internet. Fon is the world-wide greatest WIFI community and in January 2007 this community offers more than 11.000 access points in Germany and nearly 55.000 all over the world. However, this technology has also his shady sides. For example, it is possible for everyone to receive data from the wireless medium. So a protection against this open data traffic is a encryption mechanism called Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP). The tragic end of theWired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and the simplicity of various Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks on the wireless medium have resulted in giving up the security at the logical-link layer and shifting it to upper layers (or in the best case leaving it within virtual private networks (VPNs)). Nevertheless, there is an enormous growth in using public access to the Internet via HotSpots in cafés, libraries, schools or at airports, train stops etc. Therefore, it is important for the Wireless Internet Service Provider (WISP) to make sure that anyone with a usual wireless device can connect to their access points. Offering this service to anybody makes giving a sufficient level of security very difficult. On the one hand it should be easy for everyone to use this access, on the other hand there is, in most cases, no security. A businessman is not very pleased about phishing his account data for a great enterprise or for his online office like the KIS at the University of Technology in Kaiserslautern. In most cases the WISPs use a simple web based authentication mechanism. By connecting to the WISPs services, the user is redirected to a webpage requesting his login data or credit card information. Therefore the user only needs a wireless LAN device and a webbrowser to authenticate. An attacker could sniff on the wireless medium to phish delicate data from a legal connected user or use DoS attacks as initial point for various other attacks. In most cases, this can be done with no or only small effort. On the other side, in some cases, the WISP has to do a hard reset on his wireless devices after a DoS attack. Therefore an analysis of access points is done in this work. So, the first part is to show how "‘new"’ access points react to flooding attacks and what mechanisms are used to protect them. The second part implements an attack using an anomaly of some access points that are discovered in the first part. And the last chapter deals with some information about using an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to protect the devices against such attacks.

Calibration of robots has become a research field of great importance over the last decades especially in the field industrial robotics. The main reason for this is that the field of application was significantly broadened due to an increasing number of fully automated or robot assisted tasks to be performed. Those applications require significantly higher level of accuracy due to more delicate tasks that need to be fulfilled (e.g. assembly in the semiconductor industry or robot assisted medical surgery). In the past, (industrial) robot calibration had to be performed manually for every single robot under lab conditions in a long and cost intensive process. Expensive and complex measurement systems had to be operated by highly trained personnel. The result of this process is a set of measurements representing the robot pose in the task space (i.e. world coordinate system) and as joint encoder values. To determine the deviation, the robot pose indicated by the internal joint encoder values has to be compared to the physical pose (i.e. external measurement data). Hence, the errors in the kinematic model of the robot can be computed and therefore later on compensated. These errors are inevitable and caused by varying manufacturing tolerances and other sources of error (e.g. friction and deflection). They have to be compensated in order to achieve sufficient accuracy for the given tasks. Furthermore for performance, maintenance, or quality assurance reasons the robots may have to undergo the calibration process in constant time intervals to monitor and compensate e.g. ageing effects such as wear and tear. In modern production processes old fashioned procedures like the one mentioned above are no longer suitable. Therefore a new method has to be found that is less time consuming, more cost effective, and involves less (or in the long term even no) human interaction in the calibration process.

Embedded systems are becoming more and more important in today’s life in many ways. They can be found in dishwashers, mobile phones, coffee machines, PDAs, etc. Although there is no common definition of what an embedded system is, it can be generally defined as a special-purpose information processing system, containing both: software and hardware. Embedded systems are integrated in a larger systems which interact with environment for achieving a set of predefined tasks or applications. In general, embedded systems are characterized by resources scarcity, among which energy is becoming more and more important (especially the energy consumed by the processor). The energy consumed by an embedded system is strongly influenced by the software running on it (the embedded software). That is why it is crucial to explore the software characteristics that have an influence on the energy consumption, and to understand how this influence could be represented. In order to realize this task, there is a need for the construction of a reliable measurement platform for energy consumption by embedded devices. The target of this work is to design and implement a framework for measuring energy consumption of embedded software. This framework is based on the XScale architecture, a popular Intel platform designed for energy aware applications. The framework has a software repository which contains a number of programs (user-defined) that are supposed to run on the mentioned platform. These program codes are the input of the framework. Automated measurements for energy consumption are performed on all programs for gathering the required information. In the context of this work, a first evaluation of the framework was performed to make an initial check its quality.